Point-Of-Sale (POS) terminal devices often include a variety of integrated devices, such as scanners, scales, integrated scanners with scales, card readers with on-screen signature capabilities, and the like.
The scanner has become increasingly useful to retails because it can provide a variety of functionality beyond just a typical barcode scan. For instance, a scanner can take a picture of a check that is being cashed, a driver's license offered as form of identification for the check, and even images of customers while at the scanner
As more and more types of images are captured by scanners, retailers are concerned about the security of the images and the vulnerability to data sensitive images being misused. There is also an issue as to what to do with the images captured; that is, where are the images to go for processing and/or storing are.
Each retailer wants to custom control what security and what processing occurs on different types of images that there scanner processes; however, they lack the ability to have such custom control with current scanner implementations.
In fact, retailers would like the ability to route different component pieces of an image to different locations for security reasons. For example, a scanned driver's license is currently shown to a cashier as an image on the POS from the scanner but the cashier really only needs to see the name and address of the driver's license to compare with the check being cashed and there is no reason why the cashier needs to see the driver's license number (although the cashing bank may require the driver's license number for cashing the check). Presently, the cashier does see the driver's license number and any other sensitive information that may be on the driver's license, such as medical condition and the like.
Therefore, what is needed is customizable scanner image routing.